April 2022 Committee Meetings of the D128 Board with Audio Descriptions

001okay good evening everybody i'd like to call the uh program and personnel committee meeting for our for uh district 128 month for monday april 11th 2020 to order uh we'll start with the um pledge of allegiance of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation okay thank you uh first on the agenda is invitation for public comment do we have anyone in person that would like to make any comments to the program and personnel committee no we have any i do email i have one okay thank you and this letter is from marjorie mailing dear school board members i wanted to let you know how much i as a parent appreciate the extraordinary time and effort that you have all put in over the last two years during

002the kovitz situation to say that the conversations were not easy would be an understatement but discussion is critical to improvement in forward momentum i simply wanted to let you know that you are appreciated your time your efforts and your opinions whatever side that you may have been on your commitment is exemplary and we are lucky to have such passionate dedicated members on our school board i appreciate you thank you mary um next on the agenda covered 19 metrics and testing update sure just um again our metrics are always updated online on the district website so you can go onto the district website and see again it'll show our data from our students and staff at libertyville and vernon hills high school and according to the cdc we're still no transmission in our county as far

003as testing we are still testing through shield testing our unvaccinated staff weekly and that's um that's our update okay thank you very much uh any questions or comments on the board on that nope okay review of the march committee summary anyone have any updates or corrections to that okay hearing none we'll move on we have a uh looking forward to a presentation on board policy 712 that racial equity diversity and inclusion turn it over to the two principals who have been taking a yeoman chair of the leadership in our district equity leadership team and our equity coordinators are also going to be sharing in the presentation we have to stand at this desk here this is going to be the challenge but this does move so i can move it around thank you very much

004members of the board of education for having us here this evening um we are very excited as members of our district equity leadership team to provide you a glimpse into the work we've been doing um around equity in district 128 and to share with you some of the updates about um the commitments we make through our equity policy so um just to give you a very quick uh overview of the the work of our district you know that equity is firmly embedded in our daring mission it is fundamental to what we do and though it's reflected in all of our attributes it's very clear when we work with our students to help them become aware we have the goals of them becoming aware of what they love in their pursuits but also reflecting frequently on

005who they are and who they are working to become and then not just thinking about themselves and who they are but being conscious of those members of our school community who come to this place vernon hills or libertyville every day and understanding and thinking about the varied realities that other members of our commun community have we think about being inquisitive and curious about the world's complicated past present and future as well as pondering problems questioning some of the convention of our society and proposing solutions to situations that continue to vex us and then of course we emphasize being global in that we value diversity and we believe diversity is an asset to our community and that we seek to build relationships with others in order to maximize the value and the assets that we have

006within our community so while those are fundamental to what we do you as a board you know pushed us to go further and to make sure that our daring mission applies to every single student when we talk about our school community we also think about equity not just in terms of daring but in terms of access so every child in our system deserves to have access to all of the programs and facets that our school were to offer we think of equity in terms of outcomes in that we want to have high levels of learning for all of our students in our system and we know that um this has to be more than words and phrases this has to be our actions and it has to we have to walk our talk and so

007you um and we agree to have systemic accountability around this in that we reflect frequently on the progress we are making the areas of our success and our areas for continued growth and so while that daring mission is our foundation of equity we knew that in our board policies we had many different um examples where we were ensuring gender equity or where we were working to protect and preserve things like equity for students with learning disabilities and ieps and 504s there were different provisions within our policy to look at different aspects of a child's identity and to ensure that those things were protected last year if you recall you as a board went a step further and made sure that racial equity and inclusion was not just a fundamental um idea that was embedded in

008our mission but was also something that was fundamentally protected and stated in our official board policies and that is 7112 the racial equity and inclusion racial equity diversity and inclusion policy now what i do want to remind you tonight when we present out on equity as schools we are working on equity in the broadest sense of the word so we are focused on gender equity we are focused on uh income equity on uh students languages and religions obviously our goal is that every single member of our community our students our staff our parents our community members are able to come to our buildings and they are able to thrive in our environments and so we do focus on the broad sense of equity tonight however we're going to report out just on our efforts around

009racial equity and inclusion okay so that's not to say those other things aren't important but it's to say that tonight we as part of our policy that would be our focus and so um what you're going to hear tonight is you're going to hear about the different commitments that we as a school community make in the area of racial diversity equity and inclusion you're going to hear some um about the work that has been done in four of those commitments um the research the data that we used and you're gonna hear about some of the implications that we as a professional staff believe that this work uh leads us to as a district okay and so to take us into that and to kind of give you the overview of how this work was conducted

010this year introduce you to my colleague john gilliam thank you tom so i want to talk a little bit about the district equity leadership team its process and you see there a list of who's who it's a pretty impressive list in august of this year dr herman made a plea to staff to get involved with one of the significant daring initiatives happening across our district so hundreds of individuals signed up for innovation teams that focused on flexible use of time equitable grading strategic planning which i know a few of you have been a part of and and in this case uh our equity policy uh this district equity leadership team we were fortunate to have over 50 staff members volunteer for this important work uh and that's an encouraging sign as as many of these

011individuals were already doing important work on the school-wide leadership teams it demonstrates the importance of the adopted policy the value that this work brings to our organization and the commitment by so many to see it through we began meeting in the fall and quickly started work towards really three initial tasks one to review and understand the policy and what it asks of us to understand the 14 commitments as they relate to school work district work and community work and to prioritize the commitments into those that are most available and important for us as we decided to work this year as a team after a few meetings of dialogue prioritization and even some voting we selected our four components and here are the four i won't read them all but the first create focuses on creating

012an identity and firming environment for all stakeholders commitment two focuses on recruiting hiring and retaining commitment three takes a multi-faceted look at strengths and assets of students comprehensive student growth and pathways to success and commitment 6 ensures that student access to diverse inclusive and multi-racial and cultural curriculum remember all 14 commitments are important and valued summaries of the data and work in the remaining commitments will be presented to the board over the next months and as the 2021 22 school year comes to a conclusion so once we decided on the four working commitments we just assigned leadership and began the work stan i have to give credit where credit is due here to tiffany scott who was actually part of our leadership team she early on introduced and recommended a framework for each team to

013be able to use to organize and systematize their work and this process in front of you is the framework we chose step one is what we see and what we have so that's analyzing the commitments and looking at data step two was what is research saying what do we need identify current best practices and impacts on the system step three was to look take a look at actions at actions what we do and what we do that needs to be refined and then finally step four is what do we say uh analyzing the data and ultimately presenting to you tonight here to the board of education uh members of each of the four sub teams will present their work including data that was collected and analyzed highlights of research that was studied in several implications

014for now and into the future so we start tonight with commitment one and i'll turn it back over to tom and amy hi everyone i'm amy christian i am currently one of the english teachers and equity coordinators at vernon hills high school and i had the pleasure and honor to work alongside tom to co-steer this sub group and we worked with an amazing team and so while you're hearing our voices right now we want you to know that it is not the work of just our voices alone but a powerful team of volunteers from both buildings who came together to um really dig into commitment number one so commitment number one as john mentioned is all about ensuring that our schools are identity affirming environments where every student who walks in every family that comes

015in and the community itself feels safe feels welcomed and feels valued so we started off with a few different data points of the metrics that the policy stated that we would look into and that was the prescribed metrics of the panorama equity inclusion survey as well as the five essentials surveys those two surveys gave us a lot of data about our students and are they feeling belonging are they feeling safety are they feeling feeling valued i mean you can look at the full reports to see how all of those data points are analyzed but the few that we wanted to shout out right now um relates to the students sense of belonging and support at school their sense of safety and their sense of visibility in school and curriculum and these are some of the

016top data points that really spoke loudly to our group um we want you to yeah thanks tim those those surveys give us a wealth of data about our school community um and what our committee did was we not only read through the entire surveys but as amy mentioned because we were focused on identity affirming environments we laser focused in on the questions that were designed to provide us with information about that feature of our school community and so as amy mentioned here when we talk about a sense of belongingness and support at school it's how do students feel do they feel they belong that this school is a place for them that recognizes them and that supports their presence the student's sense of safety is not just physical safety but emotional safety um and do

017i feel like i'm going to be teased or bullied or harassed are there places in the building where i can go where i feel safe and then obviously um beyond some of the emotional we connected with students around the idea of do they see themselves formally represented in our school curriculum in the classes they take or do they see themselves represented in the life of the school through our extracurricular programs and different offerings and events that we do as a school community um do you want me to just highlight some of the the top five so just to um highlight for both schools um while the vast majority of our students did report feeling that they belonged at our school we did find that 32 percent of our students reported that their family has a

018sense of limited belonging in our community and that our students of color were reporting feeling a lower level of belonging at school than our white students were so we saw a little bit of a gap between that sense of belonging while students of color still reported an overall sense of belonging in our environment it wasn't as strong as what our white students were reporting for all of our schools vernon hills and libertyville the highest area that students rated of why they feel they belong was because of student and teacher trust it was the relationships between students and teachers the kids told us mattered the most for making them feel that they belong here and that was very high for all students across the board in terms of sense of safety this is very important for

019you as a board to recognize is while the vast majority of our kids did report feeling safe in our schools 638 students across both schools said that they witnessed racism in our schools sometimes to almost always so the kids are walking our halls they're going through our buildings and over the course of their year uh they're seeing things that in their minds are racist and that make them uncomfortable and that are not okay 291 of our students about half the number that witnessed it 291 said they experienced it they actually experienced racism sometimes to almost always so sometimes was like a lower level and then almost always was the highest and so within that range there were 291 students telling us not only do they witness it but that they actually experience it now what

020was a bit of a surprise to me i'll only speak for myself um are are african-american students students who identify as black while they reported um lower levels of feeling safe than our white students did they weren't the lowest the lowest level of safety that was reported at both vernon hills and libertyville was by our asian students and so our asian students were telling us when we come to libertyville high school we feel sometimes nervous we feel worried that we may be um at harm or at risk of being bullied or harassed and so that indicator was consistent at both schools and something that our committee seeing that data we know that moving forward we've really got to dig into that and understand what that is and where these types of things are happening so

021that we can work to provide an even broader sense of safety to our students would you like to talk about the visibility sure so when it comes to our students finding themselves in the school curriculum finding themselves in the texts that are in front of them and the lessons that come in front of them we know that that has an impact on their sense of belonging 71 of our white students report that they often see themselves represented in the curriculum so it's wonderful that well over half of our students are seeing both you know the windows that we hope for them to see and look outside but also mirrors to see themselves reflected in the curriculum we want you to know though that less than 51 of our students of color report seeing themselves in

022the curriculum often so while they are seeing windows of other identities they're not seeing themselves as mirrors as frequently as our white students what's what also came through in the panorama survey especially is that there are students who are expressing a desire to learn to learn about diverse identities and of each other's identities and they want to be included in equity and diversity and inclusion experiences that came through pretty loud and clear through the free responses through the panorama data and we you can see in the report some of those specific answers that are coming through there and that was not just expressed by our students of color but many of our white students are also expressing desires to be a part of this work and perhaps to look what does it look like to

023work in alliance with other students too you should know that that data all comes from this past fall and what i think is important for you as a board to understand especially perhaps when you know you're out in the community and things is it was very much um a very strong sentiment from our students that um equity discussions discussions of diversity and inclusion are very important to the students and they believe they were asking us for more opportunity to engage in discussions about it because many of them who see the racism they report believing that it's through discussions and education and communication with their peers that they can reduce those incidents so our kids are seeing it they know it's not acceptable they know it's not right they want to do something about it and

024they're looking to the adults in our system to create opportunities for them to come together with their peers and talk about these things as a way to educate one another and stand in support of one another something that's not included here because it was not a part of the prescribed metrics for measuring the policy and its effect we do want you to look into the report there's an audit of the programming that is happening in the two buildings related to diversity inequity and inclusion that's looking at our extracurricular clubs the groups that are formed through our our lsts we've audited all the different identities that are showing up in our system and what sorts of programs are available for them and we're excited to announce that there is a lot of programming available from many

025of our students identities and we're excited to keep increasing that programming a data point that you don't notice up there is data from the parents and part of c1 is about making sure that families do feel they are part of an identity affirming environment but we don't get any data from the parents in the panorama survey it's only for students and for staff and our response rate um for the five essential survey from parents we think it's too low for us to look at that as a specific metric so we need to find more ways to get the data from the parents long-term term the strategic planning survey is one of those places where we saw parents kind of calling out for more ways to communicate with school so there are some things that we

026can do going forward that actually relates to our research points these research points are really really slim right here so we hope that at some point maybe you dive into the report and then click on the annotated bibliography that our amazing counterparts worked and put together of all the research that's out there there's a lot on there out there for what can we do to increase our student's sense of belonging and one of them the first one actually has to do with family so culturally responsive family engagement leads to higher student success we really need to drill into what can we do to engage families and the community especially of our culturally and linguistically diverse students in order to make sure they're engaged and feel belonging because that will also increase their students sense of

027belonging another one of our top research points is that identity safe environments promote a growth mindset which is something we really truly believe in in d128 and it allows students to feel accepted and included so we need to do whatever we can to ensure that we are providing identity safe environments for our students finally the top the third top research point that came through is that both formal and informal identity affirming spaces are necessary for the well-being and growth of all students this is a little bit surprising to me i've done a lot of work for formal spaces to create affinity spaces for our students on our campuses but we're also learning that informal places that just kind of pop up the research supports that those are really important for students when something happens and

028arises we need to provide that space and i think what's really important again along these lines is not only did the research we look at talk about a student's sense of emotional safety and a sense of belongingness as a community but this work is so important to us because it is all linked to higher student achievement outcomes as well so absent a supportive caring community an adolescent learner doesn't achieve at their full potential with adults that as an adult learner you don't necessarily have to be quite as connected to your community to still learn and grow and get what you need out of the formal education but with adolescence with teenagers especially that is critical and it is through the social emotional the sense of belonging it is through the emotional level that our children

029learn and so this is work that we do not just to create a better healing environment for everybody but to create higher outcomes as well for our learners so with this data and the research in mind we have a few recommendations for our system um some the first set have to do with increasing parent and community engagement in the second set for increasing student belonging the data and research suggests when it comes to our families and our community belonging that we need to create spaces for culturally and linguistically diverse parents and community members to be collaborating connecting with one another um that sometimes looks like family caucuses um in some schools that is like what a b-pack the bilingual parent association those sorts of councils look like so we need to provide space for that

030we need to be bridging between the feeder schools the foundational schools and the high schools and we need to foster the opportunity to first parents to partner with the schools themselves so that way they can feel engaged in a part of those decisions we need to improve our practices and our understanding around culturally responsive communication with families it is not a one-size-fits-all approach the email communications and phone calls that my parents got when i went to libertyville high school are not the best communication for all families and so we need to learn how to communicate better with all families so that includes bi-directional and face-to-face communication when appropriate multimodal communication when appropriate i'm creating inclusive meeting times and spaces so that parents who are working late shifts are able to be included in those meetings

031as well and information presented in language that families understand and relate to so both in their home language and that's not written like we talk to each other necessarily but the way that families talk about education with their kids and finally we need to make all decisions that impact parents and families in concert with parents and families and we do this in a lot of ways in our district right but doing it with an intentional mindset and bringing in the culturally and linguistically diverse families is something that we know that we need to continue improving on to enable all families to be empowered and informed advocates for their children yeah for students it's it's similar um this idea of providing um formal through teacher-led or staff-led experiences for kids but also informal opportunities for students

032in affinity to gather as well as so it's important for us to bring kids together who share an identity for them to learn from one another for them to grow and give support to one another but we also hear very clearly and understand the need to bring kids together in multi-identity groups so that they learn to be allies for one another and kids are asking for that and our research is suggesting that we continue to develop those opportunities um also as the students told us the number one reason they feel connected and belonging is through teacher to student relationships we want to continue to prioritize staff connections with every single student and while we have nurtured that and developed that and pushed that in informal ways we think there's areas in 128 for us to

033develop formal mentoring opportunities or advisory opportunities that really go further in ensuring all students have connections with adults in our building and then obviously when kids enter our learning spaces when they enter our classrooms we're spending a lot of time with staff talking about what does it mean to have an identity affirming environment for all learners in all identities um you know we did a series of departmental workshops this year that were geared on kind of looking at the way we construct our classrooms and our formal learning spaces to be inclusive of all learners and i think for us that is a tour de force overview of our research our data and our implications and with that we're going to turn it back to john and i think brian's for c2 or just john just

034john just me bryant brian left me alone okay c2 bryant and i actually did lead this commitment uh dan was in our team as well as uh i think in your report you see approximately five other uh wonderful d128 uh staff members c2 concentrates on recruiting hiring and retaining practices that embrace a diverse staffing at all personnel and every level that reflects the global community and staff who carry out the district's commitment to equity and diversity commitment too like commitment one we spent time looking at data and research that helped to drive our implications and our work both now and in the future so i want to talk a little bit about that first of all the data i you know i've been working with kids for many years who have said things uh like

035uh dr g what we want is to have more teachers who look like us uh and and this idea of developing a diverse teaching staff especially as it relates to the data that they just told us that relationships are the key or at least a significant key in student achievement and to hear students on top of that say that teachers who come from diverse backgrounds relate to and connect with students who come from diverse backgrounds makes this a really important commitment for us and one that we've been working on for actually quite some time those first two bullets there in d128 staff of color has increased in percentage 6.3 percent in 2018-19 to 9.2 percent in 21-22 at libertyville from 5.3 to 6.8 percent and at vernon hills from 7.9 to 12.1 like i said

036it's been a commitment that we've had for quite some time and we are really eager to continue that good work uh that of course in that first bullet 6.3 to 9.2 relates to just about three percent uh of an increase over four years that translates from 28 staff of color to 44 staff of color i don't know if that what those numbers sound like to you but when you're talking about roughly 400 450 staff members to go from 28 to 44 is a significant change and we uh like i said are uh really encouraged to to increase that most notably both our black and african black black or african american and hispanic staff have doubled uh in employee counts in those four years uh that next bullet we've used frontline and apple track to determine

037where our applicants get information about our postings um applicants are not required to self-report which is one of the things that we've found particularly uh kind of challenging as we look at frontline and apple track we're not getting exactly the data that we're committed to reporting to you in these metrics uh but 19 have chosen not to report their racial background 33 percent of applicants list district or school uh indicating that applicants visit our school website in order to find out about positions and i think that's indicative of a high quality school district school employees or individuals are looking to work at our uh school and so they're searching us out through our own websites 18.1 percent of applicants have used commercial job boards including sites like lake county regional office of education k-12 job

038spot so on and so forth 18.8 percent of our applicants list word of mouth which is indicative of the value of our own professional and personal networks and um and then finally 10 of applicants found us through job fairs including both virtually especially here as we've had to kind of suffer through this pandemic and in-person job fairs uh from the ninth from the 18 19 to present d128 applicants for opening positions break down by race as such 73.9 percent of applicants are white where 68.3 percent of our students are white 9.4 percent of applicants are hispanic where 11.5 percent of our students are hispanic 1.6 of applicants are black where 1.9 of our students are black and 3.9 percent of our applicants are asian where 15.2 of our students are asian just to give you

039a little insight there when we look at uh some of the the highlights of the research that we looked at and again the comprehensive report will give you uh far more uh research uh studies and articles than what i'm going to read to you first um but the first one is the data suggests that our countries schools are increasingly diverse right 50 of students of color and growing meanwhile only 18 percent of teachers are teachers of color and that gap is widening uh point two there data indicates that the closing of the gap is not encouraging there is a good there's good news to start and that is such that teachers of color are finding jobs there's no data to suggest that because of discrimination or other teachers of color are not being hired on

040the contrary schools are recruiting a very limited pool one that is not growing as fast as teacher need the teacher pipeline especially teachers of color happens to be declining the third research point there is data suggests that teachers and staff of color are attracted to and want to work in schools that are racially diverse especially at the teacher and administrator level that's why it's so important for us to continue this good work and finally schools are more likely to retain high quality staff of color if they feel a sense of belonging d128 is their home a sense of value do we understand their perspective and are we willing to act on it and feel a sense of support do we have systems in place to encourage to develop and to further their professional aspirations thanks

041dan so that leads us to just a few implications and actions first relative to uh recruiting and hiring we need to continue to increase our presence at job fairs and on posting sites i listed some of those fairs and sites we've used in the past as kovit releases its grip we will recommit to finding local and statewide job fairs that can get us access to diverse candidate pool just as importantly like i said in our research research section teachers of color are drawn to a school where they see themselves it's important for us to send administrators of colors to these fairs so that we can attract a diverse candidate pool next we want to address the teacher pipeline at a local level this of course is far more difficult for us as a high school

042but we believe that we can and will do some good work here we are moving at both schools to start a future teacher of america club at each high school we always attract our own d128 graduates who want to teach back in our school so if we can encourage our own students especially high quality students of color to pursue to pursue teaching jobs we can have a good chance at luring them back into our hallways as teachers we also are looking toward relationships with local colleges and universities that may yield a diverse pool of student teachers and ultimately staff hires we have already taken steps to change our interview protocols and to better track applicants and hires again as i said while frontline keeps some good information and tracks some of the data that we

043have committed to reporting to you we realize it does have its limitations so in order to present you with all the specific metrics we've been asked to we've implemented a system change that has administrators responsible for hiring reporting data as they move along the recruiting interviewing and hiring process and finally we want to hire administrators of color we are committed to that and we've already begun that good work here in the district as we look at retaining staff of color just a few things first we want to implement a feedback loop for our staff of color the good news is we've already started that process this week actually wednesday dr herman will be hosting a round table with our staff of color to hear a little bit more and understand better their experiences their perspectives

044uh and their beliefs about district 128 and specifically working there dr k and i will be hosting another focus group that looks more specifically at the recruiting the hiring in the retaining process as we look to better understand what it is that we're doing well and what it is that we can improve as we try to look to support our staff of color we want to strengthen our staff of color affinity group as you've heard we have all sorts of different student affinity groups and some of these groups will be talking a little bit more about those i think but we also have a staff of color affinity group new uh that's probably a couple years old uh and as i said earlier the sense of belonging and value is so important for all staff

045but especially staff of color in this system so our goal is to strengthen that group uh provide opportunities for them to get together for them to learn from one another for them to connect to one another and ultimately get a greater sense of belonging and then finally strengthen our mentoring program we do have a mentoring program we've had one for years especially for new teachers what we haven't had is a mentoring program that focuses on new support staff and so and maybe even new administrators so what we want to do moving forward is to build on what we're doing well uh in our mentoring program with teachers to make sure that we are culturally responsive as we're looking at strategies that uh mentoring can add for our staff of color and then expand that program

046to uh those beyond just teaching sounds good that's commitment too and now i'm gonna turn it over to commitment three there all right um so i'm tara young and i was part of the leadership in the subcommittee along with shannon garcia who's not here with us this evening and we also worked with an amazing group of district employees to really focus on honoring and building upon the strengths and assets of every student promoting academic social emotional growth and providing multiple pathways to success this includes monitoring assessing the impact of educational programs on the achievement of all students so there's a lot there right we're looking at three different things when we talk about student success we're talking about the academic success we're talking about social emotional success and we're talking about um the the multiple

047pathways to success so what's what's happening when they leave our building and how are they finding success afterward and if you look at our commitment on the organizational breakdown of all the metrics that we're using to report out for each commitment you'll find that our commitment has the most reporting metrics um by far of all the the commitments and so we really this year honed in on the academic success of our students not to say that we won't also in future years look at the social emotional growth and that multiple pathways to success but because this commitment is so big that's what we focused in on this year but i think you'll see as you go through although we focused on the academic success when we start focusing on academic success just by nature we're

048going to be talking about social emotional growth we're going to be talking about multiple pathways success as well so some of the top data points that we looked and we got this from the 2021-2022 data profile that you probably are familiar with so a lot of our data comes from that data profile we really started looking at how successful are our students in the classroom so some things that were really standing out to us notice that 50 of our black students are in the striving learner category and 30 percent of our hispanic students are in the striving learner category and what we when we say striving learner that means we're talking about our lowest tracked classes so typically that's our team taught classes we're talking about our intervention courses so our literacy course our paws

049course double period algebra so a class that where there needs to be some remediation done and so we see we have an over-represent over-representation of our students of color in those striving learner courses if you break it down even more you'll see that our hispanic students only make up 8.1 percent of ap courses but they make up 23.9 of our striving learner courses and 11 and the 11.45 of our overall enrollment our black students make up one percent of our ap courses 4.5 percent of our striving learning courses but only 1.93 percent of our overall enroll enrollment so we'll see that there's this disproportionality happening what we would like to see is if we have hispanic students making up 11.5 percent of our overall enrollment we would like to see 11.45 percent of our hispanic

050students making up our ap courses 11.45 of our hispanic students in those striving learner courses we want to see proportionality within our classes and we're not seeing it right now we're seeing an over representation of black and hispanic students in those lowest tracked classes and an underrepresentation in our ap classes you might say to yourself well if they're finding success at those levels then then is that a problem and what we see from our data is that our students are not finding success okay so if you look um if you look at the data it reveals that black and hispanic students are failing courses at a higher rate than their white and asian counterparts um also we want our students to reach for that highest level course right we want our students to be taking

051those that rigorous ap coursework or at least have access to them and sometimes what happens when you have this tracked system is students who are in the lowest tracked classes don't have access to those ap classes so not only do we have students who are disproportionately represented among the different tracks we have our black and hispanic students are failing at larger rates and there's not always a pathway to even access ap classes if you're placed into the lowest tracked classes and one thing to note about the failure rates uh it's not necessarily that those lowest tracked classes are resulting in more d's or f's but it does make us ask some questions about the data right like if if these intervention courses were doing what they're intended to do we would perhaps not see such

052large failure rates or increased failure rates of our black and brown students but we are seeing more d's and f's of those later so we have to ask are these intervention courses that we've put in place are they working right um and if you look at the data that we provided in the report you'll also notice that we include test scores as well like the sat reports so it's not just within our uh our school because you could say like well you know vernon hills libertyville those are really they're high achieving schools they're taking really rigorous classes but if you look at our standardized test scores you'll also notice that our black and hispanic students are not scoring nearly as high as their white and asian counterparts so that those that was the day that

053really stood out to us as our group started going through this and so we really started to research heterogeneous classrooms how do we use classrooms are essentially just detract classrooms where we don't have all these different tracks and so when we started learning more about heterogeneous classrooms and de-tracking classrooms the research shows that heterogeneous classrooms first leads to an increased sense of belonging for our students and that's what we were talking about with our the first commitment right that we want our students to have a sense of belonging and we want them to feel like they belong in this academic environment right and they are capable of succeeding at a really high rate and what happens often is when you are in attract classroom it's not a secret to students students know kind of where

054they fit in the class hierarchy and that does decrease a student's sense of belonging and the research reveals that it decreases a student's sense of belonging because they start to feel like they can't develop that academic mindset or maybe they can't perform at the highest levels the research also shows that there are appreciable effects on striving students achievement when they are in heterogeneous classrooms and there are typically no effects on average and high ability student achievement so i think a lot of the concern with heterogeneous classroom comes in because people say well if you put all the students together you're not going to be challenging your highest level students right they're not going to be they're not the the the expectations are going to be lowered for students and what happens to those high flyers

055and the research actually does not support that the research shows that it's actually the the success rate for your ap high flying students pretty much stays the same and then the striving students have increased academic success now you will find if you look into the research that there are some schools who did not see those outcomes and that is is because of the implementation of the heterogeneous classrooms so when the heterogeneous classrooms are implemented without sound efficacy and without sound professional learning then then it fails and you do see students not performing at the high rates that we want them to but implemented well we see really really good outcomes and then heterogeneous classrooms also lead to improved cognitive skills critical thinking and problem solving skills which is embedded into our daring mission that's what

056we want for all students is to really come out of our high school with strong critical thinking skills able to look at the world and be problem solvers so we have some recommendations for the board um so the data and the research suggests that first we need to move towards heterogeneous classrooms now one of the things that came through in the data over and over again is this cannot be a rush decision you can't just detract all your classes and say okay we did it we did the thing that we want to do that it has to be done very very mindfully that comes with teacher buy-in so it needs to be a lot of teacher engagement and inclusion in that process of de-tracking there needs to be a lot of professional learning on how

057to differentiate in the classroom because when you have a lot of learners that have a lot of different learning needs and learning abilities the teacher needs to know how to be able to differentiate instruction effectively you need to have the the community involved because otherwise you will see parent and community push back if they're not involved in that the decision of moving towards heterogeneous classrooms and we then do need to think about class sizes and class optimums is how do we make sure that we um are not giving teachers so many students that they can't differentiate effectively so we will have to have it might have to have a discussion about class sizes as well we are already piloting an alternative pause structure at vhs so pause is one of our intervention programs for students

058who are struggling in their classes we are going to be using this new pilot and pause program to intensify math literacy as executive functioning skills without tar with targeted one-to-one or small group intervention typically in the past we've had the litter literacy classes we've had double period math classes and we're actually getting rid of those interventions and instead we are going to have teachers push into the paws program and do one one to one and small group intervention instead of whole class intervention so we're hoping that that will be an effective way to make sure we're still building in student support and when we do this it does increase student ability to select elective courses you'll see if you look at the perception data in the report that a lot of our students the one

059of the lowest steps in student feedback we got is that they don't always feel like they have classes that prepare them for the real world and they don't always feel like they have choice over their classes and so this is a way to increase student choice over the electives that they take because they will not have to take intervention courses it will be built into the paws program we also believe that we should continue to research the effectiveness of an advisory program this is something that came up a lot in our subcommittee we didn't research it we really focused on the heterogeneous classrooms through our research um so we didn't research this specifically but we do think building on what you've heard my colleagues talk about of the ability to mentor students and because we

060care about their social emotional growth that we should research the implementation of an advisory program where we could put an intentional sel curriculum into place and provide more mentor opportunities so that every student like like tom was talking about every student has a teacher mentor who is looking out for them and advocating on their behalf an advisory program could help to identify and explore student passions and potential post-secondary plans and we could continue to provide targeted intervention in that advisory program so that's something that we didn't get to research during our time together this year but we would recommend that we can that we do further research on what an effective advisory program would look like in d128 so now i'm going to hand it over to the singleton hi my name is ann singleton

061i am an english teacher and the equity coordinator here at libertyville high school and on this committee um i worked with tiffany scott as a co-leader she is one of our school counselors here at liberty bowl and she's not able to be here tonight and rita was also part of this team so i may be asking rita points to jump in and share some of the things we talked about with our group we were one of the smaller groups but our commitment that we worked on is ensuring all students have access to a diverse multicultural inclusive curriculum that avoids stereotypes and includes perspectives of multiple identities in order to build their awareness as they see themselves in the curriculum and help all students as they seek to understand the varied perspectives and realities of others

062this very much links directly with that dairy mission that tom talked about at the beginning so for our um for this particular commitment there were two metrics that uh the policy states and the first one um on there was a curriculum audit which was not something that we had this year and i'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment so our data then went right to the panorama survey that was given in november to all of our students and we looked in particular at the two questions are related to curriculum because of course our commitment is focused on that what are students learning about what are they doing in their classes um and so we took a look at it too and we broke it down by race and the way panorama

063set it up is it takes what it considers favorable responses and groups them together and showed us for that particular racial identity group this is how they responded in the favorable way so for the first question to what extent do you believe the school curriculum lessons textbooks videos etc include the perspective and experiences of a different of a of a diverse population and when we desegregated that by race students who responded almost always or always or frequently those are the percentages that panorama gave us so 36 percent of our american indian or alaska native students responded almost always always or frequently 38 of our asian students 31 of our black and african american students 36 of our hispanic and latino students 50 of our native hawaiian or other pacific islander students 49 of our white

064students and 43 percent of our students who identify as two or more races so we talked about this one with our and our team um a bit and one of the things that we noted is overall those percentages are a lot lower than what we'd want them to be we want our students i mean that's part of our daring mission to talk about um to be aware and to be inquisitive and to be global and these numbers aren't showing what we want them to show so that was definitely a concern that we had as a team the other question that we looked at in particular although there's some other ones listed within the longer report but these are the two we wanted to make sure we highlighted um as to what extent do you see

065yourself your identities represented in the curriculum lessons textbooks videos et cetera that your teachers use um and this one i think this one was covered as well in commitment one a bit but what was interesting about this one um the way we had to look at it desegregated is it included not only almost always always frequently it also included sometimes and our group talked a lot about like what does sometimes really even mean and the other question that we had with this is how are students seeing themselves represented in the curriculum right are they only seeing it through struggles and challenges are they seeing celebrations of their identity and another question that we had a lot of questions y'all another question that we had was well looking at this how are these are students answering

066this question thinking about their identity were they thinking about their racial identity were they thinking about their gender identity their sexual identity their religious identity so that was another question that we had um a lot so you know you could see the numbers up here the numbers are a little bit higher right but it does also incorporate that sometimes which the other question the my the first data point there or the first question i have on here had the option of sometimes but for some reason it wasn't grouped favorably so looking at these again the numbers are higher but we we felt like we needed a lot more information before we could go further and that would have been that curriculum audit so i'll talk about that um in regards to our research points so

067there we go um we spent some time talking about what kind of curriculum documents do we have we have book lists on the class websites most of us on this particular committee were english teachers so i don't know if that says something about how english teachers are interested in curriculum more than other departments but um so we talked about well we have book lists we could look at that we could take a look at uh you know standards and targets documents that we have from different departments but our concern was that if we did an internal audit we would have our own bias showing up within that and so rita did some research for us and found an option i'll talk about in a moment um that our team recommended and um that the district

068will be moving forward uh with using an outside organization but before i talk about that um what we in the meantime a curriculum audit is a pretty big project to take on not something that we knew would be able to get started this year in this timeframe we said well in the meantime let's research what does student voice look like in curriculum development um so in your packet you'll see that there we have our annotated bibliography there and so we looked through these articles together and discussed all the ways in which we wanted to make sure that our students have opportunities to share what it's like in their classes what they're learning about and what they want to learn about and what could those um be what sort of ways could we um share with

069through professional learning or other spaces to increase the amount of student voice that's showing up because we know that some is already happening but it's really about like how can we do that more and how can we do that in more of a system systemic way so it's impacting all of our students so our recommendations then the first one is um a curriculum audit which then leads the equity action plan which we'll talk about in a moment but in regards to that student voice um one of the suggestions that we have is to continue professional learning opportunities for teachers on multicultural and culturally responsive education project-based learning using surveys in class to increase student voice and using student choice for content instruction and assessment we have teachers in both buildings who have been working on

070all of these topics but it's small groups here and there and so what we'd like to see is more of a systemic approach to some of these topics we've already started seeing that with the culturally responsive education workshops this year but project based learning we've had people attend workshops now for years on that and there's so much knowledge right here in this district and some amazing work that's happening you just have to look on the twitter feed it's awesome but we really want to see that become more of a systemic approach and we think we might be ready for that so that would be one of our recommendations another thing that came up was student advisory groups came up in the research is a great place for students to have voice and share their experiences

071in school through their classroom class experiences extracurricular activities athletics any other aspect school because really while curriculum we do talk about classroom there's curriculum in clubs there's curriculum in athletics and here at lhs we have what's known as the principal advisory board where students meet once a month this is something that dr k started when he came here and uh within that group we have a subgroup that focuses on curriculum they meet with mr ray alban our assistant principal and during our monthly meetings and what we'd like to see is increasing these student advisory groups the great thing about principal advisory group it's during the school day so it increases access for students who have commitments outside of school they only miss one class a month and it's a different class period each month so

072it really is something that's built within the day and of course students know if they've got an important test that day and they need to miss that month that's okay no problem you're still a member of the team and we still want to see you when you're able to come and it creates that opportunity in that relationship where they feel really comfortable going to dr k or going to the other members um the other staff on that team so we'd love to see that be something that we have at both schools as well as thinking about like the vernon hills student diversity council are there ways to kind of have that be a space where students can share their experiences with curriculum and other areas of school and then the last thing on there we

073just wanted to give a quick shout out that our something we've been doing for years the students school board representatives is something that the research says is a great way to bring in student voice and include students in curriculum work so um that's something that uh i don't think they're here tonight so i can't give them the shout out but in two weeks they definitely deserve a shout out for being part of that um group so um i want to talk a little bit more about the equity action plan and uh i'll go over and then read if there's anything that i missed please feel free to jump in okay um so district 128 i'm so excited to tell you guys hire dr yvette dubial to help us develop an equity action plan dr dubial

074is part of uh illinois coalition of equity educational leader she's actually one of the founders of the group um and she is absolutely amazing woman who will be helping us um semester one of next year to develop an equity action plan so this will include a curriculum audit along with a lot of other stuff it's all um in that visual there i know it's kind of hard to see but basically the what uh it's set up where we will identify actions that we can take for second semester next year to advance our systemic equity work so uh dr dubial recommends either four full day workshops with this uh meetings or eight half day uh sessions and so we opted for that eight half days and early on the first uh two half days will be

075just kind of identifying and finding information what do we have as well as well as building the capacity for the team to have those conversations about equity and think about things in a systems way and then as we move forward between each of the workshops that we'll have in the meetings we have with dr dubiel we will have work that um as team members that we'll have to do to find information and bring that information back um and as of right now i think we have dates selected for the meetings um maybe a little final approval yeah yeah the dates are also in the written report for yeah um so this is uh something that where um there were a lot of things that we were hoping at least my team we were really hoping

076we could have done more with our commitment but we found that until we really know what's going on curriculum-wise we weren't able to move as far forward as we would like and so we're excited next year that this will give us a chance to do that work for that commitment as well as the commitment other commitments we talked about tonight and i think really all the commitments in our policy so and i would just add too that really the timing of the equity action plan was intentionally designed to begin once the strategic planning process had been completed so that that body of work would be known in the development of the equity action plan as led by dr daviel it might be also important to note that the equity action plan includes five strands that

077align to some of our other reporting metrics as well the equity action plan will look at systems at teaching and learning at student voice climate and culture professional learning and family and community as agency so this is a well-developed model for an equity action plan that's been used in other local districts and is really highly regarded in the area when you put out a question to my network the cadca organization which is the chicago area directors of curriculum and assessment responses to anyone doing equity audits and equity plans dr debeel's name always comes up first so she's a very busy consultant but also a very effective one and one that is highly regarded in the area so moving forward then um some next steps in our wrap up here is the board of education district

078administration review the report and consider implementation of our recommended actions we wrote what you might notice a rather lengthy report and we have all of our recommendations there with timelines and other information the district leadership team will continue monitoring and reporting um on remaining policy commitments we are so excited to have our new director of equity and inclusion mr larry varn here with us tonight in the audience um so we're excited to share with him the work that we've been doing and hear his ideas and perspectives and work with him as we move forward and then um we'll be preparing for that formal equity audit in the fall of 2022 and i i'm i'm that's it that's my wrap up does anyone have any questions don't have any questions but i want to thank you

079for all this work it's it's tremendous work i really appreciate the the focus on really looking at the data to really looking at the what's the reality and and moving forward from there um it got a great start i will tell you dr dubia is terrific uh she will push you to think of things in ways that you maybe aren't currently thinking uh she's big on looking at data from an intersectionality perspective she's just terrific we've at the district where i work we've worked with her for a number of years and um she's just terrific to work with she's she'll guide you right down the right path so and we've our equity plan is based on the the plan that uh that you were uh speaking to so i really appreciate the work and uh

080uh you know i think we're off to a good start anyone else have questions comments well i guess my main question is where are we in the process in order to be even happy in this conversation because it seems like are we still teasing out where we want to go or are we because i do have some questions about the student's success commitment but i don't even know if it's appropriate to bring it out if it's still being teased out within the community i think it would be important to bring out questions concerns comments i think that's what we're hoping for is a dialogue um this is what the point of focus for this year's uh delt committee was again there are 11 commitments we chose four to focus on being coming out of the

081pandemic um so we took a deeper dive into these four um so i think it would be very helpful for us to receive feedback from the board um and again these i think are recommendations based on our baseline data um you know so um talking about them trying to be as data-based as possible um i think that um because this policy was authored last march um and you adopted it and it required metrics us coming to you now sort of as we're finishing up the strategic planning process we just felt that we needed to uh fulfill that commitment and that some of this information will probably feed directly into some of the goals that we might have for strategic planning so while they're on sort of separate paths right now because of the difference in

082starting and ending times i definitely see them informing one another so i guess my initial question and i i'm gonna plead ignorance and not knowing the day-to-day you know i was surprised to even hear the term tracking as i've had two students go through this school in the district i never envisioned their participation as a tract and i've had student my own children have gone ap and have paused you know so i i've seen both perspectives but i never really um i never used that terminology and saw it as a tracking so when we use the terminology d-tracking and i guess my first question is how do you define that what does that look like if we're talking about a potential end game of having a de-tracking system what does that look like that would

083be my first question and my second question i i don't know that we've we have a good definition to community and parents about what what this striving learner slash team taught classes are um again i'm gonna i'm gonna say ignorance you know i i'm gonna plead ignorance of not knowing this system but i assumed all of our students were kind of on a default i don't want to see i know in our data we call it a college prep readiness i always use general educate you know just a general education so i assumed that everybody was at least on this kind of college prep general education and we made differentiation based on what they needed i have my my experience with teen todd is it was presented to me as this is a class that

084has two teachers but the material the scope and sequence and the expectations are the same as if they were in a general or college prep class of the same title yet they have two teachers and yes there are students in there who need additional support but not so i think we need to define what is this team taught because it's not being presented it's not being presented consistently in one way at least in my experience so those are my first two kind of concerns that are we saying that if a student is in this striving learner they have no potential to be in a general ed where i thought all of them were in a college prep so i i guess i would want more information on what that is looking like so before you

085answer it i just want to let you know i had pretty much the same questions and i just figured i'm not from the education industry so i think it will help me to kind of understand what these terms actually mean before i can evaluate what what they mean well i can go ahead and start and tara can chime in too you did a very nice job with the overview um i think that what the committee is recommending is actually answering the questions more clearly that you were talking about is the data that we have first of all we're really careful to not try and say you're a striving learner student or this or that it's which category of courses are you in because you can have a student who's maybe really struggles with reading but

086excels in math and so you could have a student who is participating in different levels of courses that we offer i think that one of the things that we're seeing is in our team taught sections while teachers are doing their absolute best to try and maintain consistent expectations for those students when you have all of the students in a given section of a class who have identified areas of struggle in that it's very difficult even with two teachers to continue to keep the high level of rigor moving forward when we break our student achievement data down we see that students so we we are trying to put them in a supportive environment we are trying to with two teachers we're differentiating the curriculum but the progress that we see for those students on sat and

087some other standardized tests continues to still be lower than their grade level peers and so i think one of the things that our committee was saying is we are a district who we have invested resources in trying to close this achievement gap but one of the things our data is showing is that our current structure is still perpetuating that so our recommendation isn't to do away with honors or anything like that it is to say can we look at ways where rather than having all the students who struggle in one section are there other ways that we could think of that are more inclusive that students will have opportunities to be with their peers and to have higher expectations so we our committee is also on that same journey of taking a deep dive this

088year on who are the groups who are struggling what interventions are we currently using and are those interventions being helpful um so this idea of exploring heterogeneous options um we we also did hear from some students who talked about you know i i even though we don't we never build students schedules on tracks they talk about being in this group that goes from this support class to this support class to this support class and they don't have a lot of interaction with their other grade level peers in in except in some electives and other courses like that so while that's a small portion of the students when we do ask them questions about that um they do report feeling like a subgroup traveling through their day be just because of the way their courses are

089scheduled tara would you add anything else to that um trying to provide interventions oftentimes because you see themselves in the future class and they start to develop an academic where they start to they don't see themselves as a learner and they see themselves in the like they're like that is often and that can is [Music] i guess i'm confused though because um one of the recommendations or if i'm looking at the timeline for implementation beginning next school year co-taught classes will be offered in both buildings and they are currently offered in both buildings can i interrupt for a second should you be on mic so that anybody do we have people watching remotely oh that's a good point you should be on mike thank you that way anybody who's watching this stream will be able

090to hear you yeah so thanks for asking that question because kotat is different than team taught so team talk classes right now are taught by two content experts um co-classes are taught by a content expert and then um an expert in special education and so the goal of the co-taught class and the cult we have these types of classes that are running at lhs they're not currently running in the same way at vernon hills but will be next year um the co-taught classes the goal is that it will be identical because right now we say that the team taught classes and the on-level classes or what you might call the college prep classes we say that they're identical but the reality is is they're often not identical okay and that's because the students in those

091team taught classes have they learn at much different paces and there are many many more dependent learners and so it it just is impossible to stay on track with those on level classes what a co-taught class does is it brings in the content the content teacher right the content expert and then you have a special education there who works alongside with that content expert to help to differentiate for students who have ieps who need more accommodations and so it's a different model and this is a model that we are currently exploring we just sent a team this year to learn more about the co-top model i am not an expert on it so if anyone else wants to jump in and speak to it that would be wonderful but it is a different model of

092teaching and will be identical to the on level classes while providing the necessary scaffolds and interventions for those students who do need additional support so then what happens in a heterogeneous class does the teacher become a single teacher who's doing the content and the intervention and differentiating for all of the levels in their class yes and so that's why we talked about we need to make sure that in those heterogeneous classrooms we have first teachers who believe that you need teacher buy-in teachers need to believe that these heterogeneous classes can work and will work so we need to make sure that we have teacher buying that we have teacher engagement and that professional learning are on differentiation which is going to be so important the research shows that heterogeneous classrooms work when you have those

093things in place but that is and uh tara's correct but that is not an absence of academic interventions so right now what you've got are one model of putting students together who require who we believe require interventions throughout the year and you deliver it in a team taught model with two teachers focused on delivering the intervention in the classroom what more and what more schools are doing and what the research is showing is very effective and what um some of the discussion that we've had even internally is is to be more flexible in terms of the intervention in when students receive the intervention and how long they receive an intervention for so if you were to go to more heterogeneous classes what you would do is you would create more flexible models of intervention where

094either an interventionist is pushed in at times to work with groups of students or where you have students who are in need of that intervention getting that support outside of the actual classroom period so that instead of it being right in the class during that time only some of the students may require the intervention they would go to that um during their day they would get that support the other students who didn't need that intervention would not go during that time they would have other things that they would be able to do but in a differentiated homogenous classroom students would still be aware that they're receiving interventions whether it is in the classroom or outside of the classroom so the idea that their identity as a learner is somehow different in a heterogeneous classroom doesn't

095make sense to me well in a heterogeneous classroom what happens frequently is that you normalize intervention for all students because we're all learning and we're all growing and so what happens is rather than it being a system-wide view that intervention is reserved only for kids who struggle and that those students struggle if they struggle they struggle all the time and they need intervention all the time what this does is it says intervention is much more flexible we may all benefit from it at various times and it's open and accessible to all students and so what that does is it kind of normalizes this type of support being applied to anybody in the school who needs it in any given time for a specific skill versus saying well you've struggled historically in math you might be

096pretty solid in this math class we're going to put you in but because you've struggled historically we're going to put you in a class where there's intervention built in every single day to your class so you know it's a different approach that we have and what it does is it allows kids to start to be more aware of their skill development it starts to mean that interventions are shorter term in duration so i might only need support for a specific skill that might be two to three weeks of time and after that i don't necessarily need the intervention and therefore i don't have to spend my time during the day in an intervention period um it's more of a flexible use of time for me i see i i guess i'm concerned that it doesn't

097have us the potential to have a significant impact on student self-identification and i'm even more concerned about our teachers and putting an onerous burden on a teacher to shift their teaching to a much more complicated method and and i'm i'm acutely aware of this in our post-pandemic environment because teachers are telling us we're struggling we don't have enough time we can't do everything that we want to do and we know we want to deliver to our students and to add the burden of converting their teaching to a heterogeneous yet differentiated environment seems to me too big of an ask so i appreciate you asking these questions lisa because these are the same questions that came up in our subcommittee these i mean you could feel sometimes in our subcommittee the the burden that the teachers

098were carrying um the exhaustion that teachers were feeling um and also this the same fear of like does this is this really gonna work for our students will it increase their sense of belonging in the classroom for the very reasons that you just stated so so two things that i'm thinking about and that we talked about in our subcommittee group so one of the research articles that we read was one by joe boller who's a math teacher and she talks about um you can read the study i would i won't get into the details of it but in one particular heterogeneous classroom study that she did she they found that classrooms that fostered um what did she call it a community of respect where all students knew that they had something to bring to the

099table and they had something to learn at the table that i have assets that you don't have and you have assets that i don't have and i'm going to push back on you there because i i believe our teachers are already trying to create that kind of environment that in their classrooms they do create an environment where all of their learners are valued and and may have something to bring to the table so i i'm not convinced that you need a heterogeneous classroom in order to promote that i think particular idea i think there's one example though and i would agree lisa there are so many instances where our teachers are differentiating and you know being model teachers in terms of what this model would be um striving for but the actual structure of our

100team taught sections is homogeneous and it is all students who need help and so i think some of the things that you're imagining our teachers doing are happening our college prep classes because they have a wide range of learners and teachers are already doing that and it's already happening in all of our elective classes so our elective teachers are excellent at doing this because they see all learners all together so we know our teachers can do this and do this well it right now is our system is placing students who struggle all in the same classroom making it very difficult even with differentiation and even with other strategies to get students to perform at that high level and i i think too what i heard you say lisa is that like the teachers have high

101expectations of their students they believe that every student can do the learning and i think i agree with you but students don't always believe that about each other and so i think what we want to make sure we're doing and what this this research article showed is that the students believed about each other and they believed that they had that they were not only responsible it was really very surprising to me when i read it um but what they believed was that they were not only responsible for their own learning but they believe that they were responsible for their learning of their classmates and so it wasn't just this like i'm good at this and you're not good at that it was like i'm good at this and i'm going to help you be good

102at that too and it was a give-and-take and it was really it was a really impressive uh outcome of the study that i was not expecting that by the way has a great deal to do with the quality of the teacher so that's where that training piece comes in is that we will have to have that quality but not that we don't now but you you're you're juggling in a different way i'd like to i'd like to just challenge us all in that one of the things that happens frequently in organizational change is that you can look at technical change and technical solutions and in technical change and solutions the answer is known already somebody has already figured it out and you bring in an expert or you bring in a manual and you review

103it and you retool your system in order to get that outcome when we think about leading for equity and when we think about adaptations for inclusion of all learners what we're really doing is we're talking about adaptive change and that's ronald heifetz's work and adaptive change is process and iteration and very much design thinking and so in adaptive change the answer isn't necessarily known the solution isn't necessarily known but what you have to do is you don't make a change in isolation so to your point lisa if we just created heterogeneous classes absent any differences in how we use time absent in any differences in how we use our interventions to support our students absent in any differences in how we're measuring achievement all we're really doing is taking a bandwidth of a class that

104we know is heterogeneous to begin with but we believe is homogeneous because we're making arbitrary slices of our students and saying this is the bandwidth of a typical ap student this is a bandwidth of a typical college prep student and within this our teachers can manage it what we're trying to do is say that bandwidth can be widened that bandwidth can be widened and within an adaptive solution of our system yes the teacher does have responsibilities to teach in different ways but it's not all on the teacher there's a different use of time there's a different use of intervention there's a different use of structures within our system that ultimately results in us being something very different as an organization than just um a change to how we're grouping students in the class and i

105think that's the work that i always try to keep in mind is as we do this work the implications are to become more heterogeneous in our student groupings but to remind ourselves that that requires adaptive change around for that model to be successful and to address that because just one point because as i was looking at the presentation and reading what i was coming to you is that you need to have a combination of changes to have the desired outcome if you just made it heterogeneous for example it's it's not going to have the right results it's really having that complete structure in place yes that's right i asked you where are we in this process because it seems like we're in the baby steps of the thinking about it process yes i mean i

106would say you are right about baby steps and all the research that we looked at and we also looked at models of surrounding schools who have moved towards heterogeneous classrooms and um most schools who start to make their classrooms heterogeneous it's a two to three year rollout process of getting the teacher buy-in doing the professional learning and then it's that continual monitoring um to ensure that we are you know creating uh the learning environments that we want for our students so so we do need to do more learning we can't just say okay we're taking this all away for next year because like lisa said our teachers are exhausted and if we made this drastic change for next school year that would i think be detrimental to our teachers and then therefore to our students

107too so it needs to be very mindfully and thoughtfully rolled out can you give some examples of schools locally that you've looked at yeah so we looked at evanston township high school and oak park's model as well that have moved to towards heterogeneous classrooms and they also don't all start at the same in the same discipline so a lot of times you'll see that english classes start first math classes are usually the last ones to be detract i'm not a math person but i've talked to some math people who talk about how complicated it can be to detract um the math classrooms and so often times i think i'm trying to think of oak park's model that we included in the report they give their timeline for detracting and i believe it was two years

108between the initial conversations and then the first decrep detract classroom that was at their freshman level english class so it wasn't all at once either but it was slow and very controlled district 214 is also working this and rita and a number of our administrators attended some various webinars on that and um stevenson high school has been working on some aspects of this um and so around us like john and i as principals when we attend a lot of our principal meetings these are conversations that we're talking about as well with building leadership um just in the ways that districts are looking at this and working to kind of find ways to begin to initiate some of these changes um at their schools do i think the word detracting um is it's the category or

109if you do a search term on what the research around this is i think that that word for us isn't as appropriate as the idea of inclusion in grade level uh content and and being with your peers so we see this as the i the inclusion part rather than students who are struggling being separated into a section of just students who struggle to say we know that through peer support through differentiated instruction and through other things we can help these students see themselves as learners provide the support they do need because it's if there is an achievement gap it's not going to close unless they have the skills and the knowledge and other things like that but can we find a way to provide them with the skills and knowledge they need but not have

110to have them be segregated from their grade level peers can i ask a clarifying question regarding um honors and ap courses so we have our college prep um and we're proposing to to make more heterogeneous these college prep courses and uh bring the bottom up maybe bring not the top down but you meet in the middle i suppose kind of i'm saying it wrong what we want to do is keeping the top there got it but can you tell me how does this all play out in an honors an ap format yeah so what we really want to do with all of this is expand access to our most rigorous most challenging courses and we want to see a greater representation of all of our students having the ability if they choose to take those

111classes and be part of those academic environments so it's not about a reduction in the top saying we don't want to push our kids this hard what we want to do is we want to create the opportunities for all of our students to enter those academic areas and so what that looks like is something we call diagonal movement where a student starts in um maybe they're in the college prep level and through the development of their identity their academic identity through the development of their skills they start to recognize i am able to take and move myself into an ap class or an honors class in this subject area for some students they come in and they already feel confident with that and they'll say well i'm going to take honors biology and i'm going

112to take honors math i could take honors english but i'm not going to because i don't really like english and i want to be an engineer other students don't have that sophisticated sense of that and as we work with them and as we build their skills we say you know you're doing very well here you could push yourself into this honors or ap track and so what we do by doing that is we start to look to see more proportionality among our students of who is taking those classes rather than just sort of accept that these classes are for this certain type of student it's an idea of getting our students to believe from day one of their freshman year that if they don't have the skills that they believe are going to get them

113into an ap or an honors class it's they don't have them yet and through the work through our curriculum through them uh taking advantage of the systemic interventions we have in place through the work of our teachers we can build their skills so that they can make that trajectory um before they graduate okay so not limiting them to kind of stagnating in these lower level courses over time but giving them the opportunity to literally take those well not literally abstractly take those walls down and cross diagonally into potentially more challenging more rigorous coursework which i love and i think is a fantastic kind of point that you're making here um can i just give you my my broad kind of interpretation here kind of my questions and well while i have the mic um so

114i i'm blown away by the data you collected by the evidence you gathered by the articles that you had in your presentation um i poured over this yesterday and today and i i totally blown away at the quality of the work and the thoughtfulness of the conclusions that were reached um commitment one two and four totally on board with it it it makes so much sense and as you know to borrow a phrase from our young people i'm vibing it right i'm i'm vibing with it i don't even know i'm not that interesting anymore but the point is right i'm picking up what you're putting down and i think it's fantastic i really struggle and have some major concerns with regard to the detracting um [Music] and i'm i'm really wondering if we're just kind

115of putting the horse before the cart with it i'm wondering if we can focus on commitments one two and and it's labeled here as six but we'll call it our fourth commitment um really you know kind of foster and cultivate our energy towards accomplishing those and then kind of seeing where we're at and then maybe talk more about detracting and i i you know i really thought about some of these example districts you had put forth eths and oprf and when i immediately thought of them i thought of well those are kind of quasi-urban demographics we're looking at and certainly they may have different needs and just kind of a different set of circumstances and our whole student and body and community have not that that disqualifies us from eventually moving toward tracking but i

116just detracting i wonder if we just may go about it differently i wonder if addressing commitments one two and four prior to really digging our teeth into commitment three may be beneficial i also have a thought that perhaps maybe something that we we could propose to do is pilot an entire detracting program to almost create a school within a school model to see how this goes collect our own district level data and then tweak and implement as necessary because i if i'm being honest with you i i'm i'm an educator i i'm again i'm totally understanding and loving what i'm hearing from you i support so much of it but when i just think of the buy-in required to have this drastic paradigm shift happen happen within our community i i just i'm very concerned

117about the length of time it will take and um the energy required to make that happen um and this community likes evidence of things working we i think everyone knows at this point i've been a d128 resident pretty much my entire life and you can go back 23 years ago now to when the new school the new school vernon hills was built and so much evidence was needed and so much data and so many promotional videos and all these teams were needed to just even introduce this thought that oh perhaps yes we're overflowing here at lhs perhaps we need more space and i'm not saying we haven't grown and changed and progressed from 23 years ago but but we live in an intelligent community that requires i feel a lot of evidence for the things

118that we do um and and i personally as a stakeholder would encourage some type of piloted program before we really pushed to um include our entire d128 community in this detracting model so i'm very open-minded to it i have a gazillion other questions that i will not put out here tonight but um [Music] i just think we may need a little more uh evolution of this idea yeah and i agree and just to be clear this committee is not recommending to you a specific detracting model um and we're not saying next year we immediately begin this what we're talking about though that i believe the board supports is the expanding of access for students into higher level courses so that they can reach their full potential and that's really the driving force behind this is

119um not to just universally detract in in in a quick order but to say if our goal is to expand access for our students who are capable of making those diagonal moves and move higher what is the system what are the structures that we need to put in place over a period of time in order to make that happen and how do we do it in a responsible way so that we're gathering the data and we're preparing not only the students and the parents but our staff in order to do that well we also need to include like this was just one subcommittee filled with some teachers some department supervisors so it needs to become a much broader conversation that involves not only community stakeholders but stakeholders within our own district that includes all department

120supervisors so as tom said it's the beginning of our recommendation towards movement but we know that there are a lot of conversations that need to happen in the next year or two years in order to make sure that we are ready to roll out a plan that will as time said increase access to those higher level classes can i ask some nuts and bolts questions real quick academic literacy is taught at both schools or just vernon hills just vernon hills currently okay and is there an accelerated academic literacy offering there's academic literacy at this point for freshmen and for sophomores so they move up from literacy one to literacy two as they move from ninth grade to tenth grade but i mean there's nothing there's an honors credit level so right now freshmen all take

121english yes regardless of whether they were i don't know if we use explore plan anymore so uh because those are the numbers that i know uh regardless of where they tested in every freshman takes english freshman and literacy are english i'm sorry english and literacy are two different classes right so i'm just looking at it says academic literacy one and then sophomore year is academic literacy too and those are for students who have been identified as needing additional interventions and remediation economic literacy otherwise they would go into argumentation debate bible's literature college prep writing those are senior elections those are all it says they're offered to 10th grade correct but seniors take them most um most of all once in a while you'll get a sophomore or junior but primarily their senior election okay so

122we also offer to ninth graders emergent multilingual class what is that so the merchant multilingual class it goes along with a literacy component so typically a student would be in an english class and they would be in emerging multilingual classes they would not also be in academic literacy on top of that so they would not typically have those three because the literacy services are offered through the em services those are the classes for our english learners right yeah so they they are taking that as their english support class so that's not a question of uh of them taking attract class necessarily that's that's a support class because they're english language learners yes and it then limits their um their capacity to then later on take certain electives we have certain electives in our school that

123require prerequisites so that you must take elective one for your business class for example junior year so that that way you can take the higher level marketing class your senior year and if a student is in academic literacy classes earlier on it um it doesn't allow them to ever get to those higher level classes down the line so it's not an explicit track but it is an implicit track in some ways because it might um limit their ability to get to some of those classes later on because their schedule is so tied um to their intervention classes alongside the regular core curricular classes that every student takes okay so what i'm trying to do is find out pretty much for freshmen though we're already in heterogeneous classrooms there are freshman team talk classes freshman college

124prep and freshman honors classes there are three different levels that's what i was asking so are there three levels of academic literacy no academic literacy there's only one level and it's almost always going to be your students who are in the team english classes every once in a while you get one or two students who are in the college prep class so those students are taking two classes within the ela department um they're taking a literacy class and their english usually team taught right i see the mistake that i'm making this is split up on two pages and while i have the full page here there is another page of offerings okay so now i understand so that gets back to the nuts and bolts um are we talking about then say like oak park

125did taking freshman english and saying we're gonna start here or are we thinking what we really want to do is we want to take all freshman level class actually oak park did take all freshman level classes after three years right so they they studied and then they implemented all freshman classes were not tracked and oftentimes a school like evanston high school will include an earned honors option so that that way all students are taking the same course but there are certain um you know additional projects or depending on the grades that they earn in certain you know big ticket items along the way they could earn the honors within the same classroom setting with the same teacher okay i'm sorry i was trying to get to kara's point like the whole drastic paradigm shift is

126it a drastic paradigm shift it might not be we haven't we haven't decided that yet we haven't decided exactly where we're starting with what class if it's a smaller pilot group that we're starting with so these are all the decisions that need to be made so from us right now what what we're looking for is uh support to continue looking boring yes right i'm all for it i support continuing to look i'm not ready to jump into it next year neither are we no no but i do think you've uncovered something that's pretty imminent that does need to be dressed today how are we i mean what you're saying is where what i'm hearing is those learners who need additional support are not making growth it's in our equity because they can also be identity

127identified as certain subgroups of our population so as much as yeah we're going to look at this and see what happens but it seems to me you also have a pretty imminent problem to work out i think it is i think it is a minute and i think i mean i feel very passionately about this but our the trends that we see in our school these are national trends right that when we see this data like it shouldn't surprise us because this is linked to historic inequities and so i feel very passionately that it is our responsibility as a district to start to kind of radically but methodically and intentionally rethink how we provide instruction to our students and the ways in which we're providing access to students because if i don't i think if

128we don't we will continue to see the same learning outcomes i'm just i keep coming back and being kind of surprised that we're even using the word tract as i just have not heard that in the six years that we've been here and then uh i think we are not uh i think that our message of what a teen taught class looks like and what their purpose is is not being consistently presented and it was a a presentation of it is a head uh hum a grouping of students who do need intervention with another grouping of students who are also college prep that happen to fit in their schedule that it would be co-taught yeah that's not a team topic so i just want to maybe make sure you're leading tonight's discussion with those two

129distinctions co-taught classes are a general education teacher and a special education teacher but in order for it to maintain its general education status there can be no more than one-third of students who have an iep so it's built into the model because so much of the law and access for idea is trying to build inclusion with their grade level peers that is the problem with team taught it is almost 100 percent of students who have struggles they still have two teachers but just how idea calls for inclusion because there's so much evidence that when students are learning and just being near a person who is modeling the right way to start an essay all of those other kind of peer supports that naturally come in a very active classroom those things are absent when you

130have only students who struggle so how coat in our district our team our our two teacher classrooms are a team our team taught would be two algebra teachers two english teachers where our co-taught is a model for delivering special education services and those are heterogeneous classes that is exactly what we're what we would be advocating we try and do more of absolutely so currently our team talk classes are our homogeneous classes they are all recommended to get that intervention level support with two teachers at the same time um i stood up because i wanted to make a connection back to c1 belonging and i want to bring some student perspectives into the room right now they're not here sitting next to me but i just want to tell you two quick stories that kind of

131connect to what we're talking about and how um taking off the limitations to be able to access the higher level courses how it increases student belonging i'm gonna tell you about a student named jocelyn and jocelyn is representative of many students i've taught over the years i've taught team taught sophomore english for 12 years now at vernon hills high school there are four levels of classes that are accessible to our students in in sophomore year there's the instructional english through special education there's team taught there's college prep and there's honors and every year by about january or so i notice that there are some students in my team taught class who i think they are ready they are ready to move on they do not need the two teacher support and i'll encourage them sometimes

132at the semester or definitely for the following school year hey you're ready you do not need the two teacher support anymore i really recommend that you take junior american english at the college prep level and that might even give you access as a senior to take ap literature because i think you're on your way you're finding your strengths you've got this and i cannot tell you that jocelyn is not the only one who will look at me and say no miss christian i'm comfortable where i am these are the people i know because they're in my algebra class too we've had all of our classes together since sixth grade we've always been together this is where i'm comfortable i don't think i'm ready and i have pushed back with those students time and time again

133and so many times jocelyn and her and her colleagues will say no i'm gonna stay in team taught junior year american lit and then what happens is then that student will then also perhaps decide not to then become a diagonal mover their senior year i want to tell you another story a few years ago when we started the ap 7 class that's open to juniors and seniors we decided it was really important to encourage that ap stem class to be open to everybody because college board says that we should not be eliminating who is taking ap classes so there was a big push in the sophomore world like classes when it was enrollment time recruitment time for junior year to say hey we think you belong in this ap sem course too and we had

134about six students say okay i'm game i'll buy it let's do it and what happened was by about january the following year when they were in that ap7 class half of them maybe three or four of them dropped out and they told their counselors that they did not feel like they belonged in those classes they had never been with those other kids ever before it was the first time being there and they didn't belong they felt in some ways looked down upon but a lot of it was it was internally they did not feel that sense of belonging and so they left that ap level course and then they did not pursue another ap level english course their senior year so i just want us to connect this idea of belonging with um pushing students

135towards those those upper level pathways of success and yes this is going to be a long term process and and exploration but i want us to not divorce belonging from um that specific commitment to because they're so related and so i just wanted to bring in student perspectives so we can imagine um from from their points of view and tell one more story please so i teach team taught juniors and um i'm going to say the same student's name is marissa so i taught marissa in my team taught junior class it's a homogeneous class um and then i i had the pleasure of having mercy again this year and my senior elective which is a heterogeneous class and the third day of class i was just standing nearby and i'm listening to marissa talk amongst

136her classmates because they were talking about whatever they were supposed to be talking about right and i hear marissa go i never knew that we could have conversations like this in class and that people could hear me and understand my perspective and it sort of broke my heart that it took her to her senior year for her to be in this heterogeneous environment with kids who had been in ap before and college prep before and to be engaged in this high level academic discussion and for marissa to feel like she was playing a pivotal role in that academic discussion so just one more student voice story to bring in about how heterogeneous classrooms can increase student belonging in a really meaningful powerful way and can i just add you know i think this this concept

137of detracting you know it almost serves as in my mind kind of the culmination in addressing all of those other dei goals those larger dei goals that that we you know have put forth i think that's kind of the point you're trying to make the detracting fosters every one of those points that you had committed to those four points we're committing to and so um you know it's i think a lot of us as board members and a lot of people are going to have a hard time wrapping their head around how one facilitates all the others but i i think in a perfect world and i'm hoping we're getting closer and closer to a perfect world every day but in a perfect world that's exactly what it does it groups these heterogeneous groupings of

138students who can grow and learn and support one another and you know when they go out into the world that will be the microcosm of the world right that is their microcosm of the world so it completely makes sense um so i you know as as a starting off point you know for a conversation that i hope we're going to continue to have and develop these ideas i can't wait to hear more i think and and i'm not speaking for any other board member but i think you know where the concerns still lie are the the implementation the buy-in um the scale the scaling up potentially from something smaller and um giving giving people giving every stakeholder time to really wrap their brain around these broader dei goals for our district to understand how the

139detracting model supports those i just might jump into i stayed quiet early on because i wasn't an active part of the commitment 3 group i wasn't part of that that group but when you think about the overarching goals of a program that would include students of varying skill levels and engaged in a skills-based inquiry-based project-based environment at an entry-level course say an entry-level social studies skills course where there is the opportunity to develop earned honors credit that but i think that's what this group is talking about how do we open doors through a very thoughtfully designed pilot of a course that all students have to take and all students begin to develop the skills that they'll need to gain access to upper level courses the other thing that i think should be noted is i

140think it's a really good thing cara that you said you are surprised to hear the word tracking and that means that most of our students feel the opportunities that we've tried to develop over the years to promote access to upper level classes specifically maybe a single ap course that they choose to take over the course of their high school career that's been a long-term goal that we've talked about together as a group and we've intentionally added classes like ap seminar and other courses that really are not the goal of our additional ap courses has not has not been to provide another ap course for every kid that takes nothing but ap courses it's been to introduce courses that promote that access to kids who who weren't choosing the current ap offerings that we had so

141i do think that in you know moving forward into the future exploring these ways of promoting access removing barriers in really intentional ways that we have done i think that's what this group is is talking about and exploring that that option for a community of learners who are of varying degrees of ability um and and who learn to grow together and based on their assets and strengths i think there's room to explore those opportunities and and so i just wanted to add from my perspective and kind of historical view as well that that that has been a goal and obviously our data shows that that all the things that we've tried are not working for specific subsets of students and so we have to continue to explore what will work for those students but not

142in a way that seems overwhelming or inaccessible to our teachers for sure so for me i think i came in with a higher level of anxiety before this conversation so thank you to everyone for i think you've brought my comfort level up a significant level what also struck me is as we are looking at improving access it's improving access for all students but the largest benefit for the the i don't know the right word the teacher taught the the driving students students who might need more support yeah they that right now is uh seems like more slated towards uh students of color so they will they will see hopefully the the biggest benefit there but it actually helps all students get more access to their full potential so i think as you talk through this

143it's important to continue making that known that it's not just for a particular racial group it's it's really for all acts all students to get to their max potential i'll just make a couple comments i've been listening to everyone here and and what strikes me is yes and in many ways if we continue to do more of what we've done and still not receive the results we have to at some point in time consider other options but what strikes me as interesting is the term tracking and you the work around this kind of thing in the the quote detracting is not new it's been around a long time it's been around maybe at the elementary level uh a bit longer than the high school level but it's been around a while and that the idea

144of detracting i i think it it it's has for me it's sort of a sense of of um i don't know to be able to actually acknowledge that we have these homogeneous classes still and and that even though this momentum whether it's idea or whatever that's pushing towards these heterogeneous environments giving kids these students the access to uh the learning the environments that that they really should have it strikes me as interesting that we're now recognizing that no we're not there yet and we have more work to do and i think we're now at that point where some of these things get harder to do and more difficult to do and yes maybe take a little more time and a little more resource and maybe take a while to roll out but i i'm i'm

145just impressed that i i wish everyone you know we've been at so many meetings board meetings and committee meetings i wish so many people could be sitting in that audience and hearing the valuable conversation and the deep questions and whatnot i'm just even though it's taking some time i think it's time we're well spent and and really you know interesting conversation so we appreciate the time that you folks bring uh to us this evening and uh all the hard work that goes into this and looking forward to more anyone else have any wrapping i have a thousand more questions yeah me too the question is is this the time do we just keep all right well i think out of respect of other things on our agenda i think that one thing that would be

146helpful is uh you know like you said you came in with higher anxiety it's lower now what questions remain and to think of a way to gather those so our team um can follow up and i'm sure some will be easy to answer and some are going to be we don't know but let's make sure that it's more clear that that's still a question to be investigated this the idea of continuing to investigate options for headed this is at very early but again because it is politically charged we wanted to make sure we were talking with you openly about it right away and so this is us saying here's what we're learning we think it might have some influence to help us in our system we'd like to investigate it further so we present those

147questions very quickly now or do we send them to you or one of the committee members because i can ask three questions really fast but you have a thousand i have a thousand three right now that are i already parsed them out i got an idea okay it's up to you in terms of the meeting time um if you got three quick ones we can at least hear them maybe we won't have the complete answer but that that will be sure we can okay the community community's gonna wonder about that honors credit so what do we do about that now we addressed it a little bit tonight so honors credit the honors credit like i want my kid to have a five-point gpa by the time they get out of here so how how are

148we addressing that this is not an insignificant cost just the training alone based on your figures is going to be substantial if our role as board members are to do everything that we can to ensure that our kids are getting the best education possible then i would say that we can afford it but it's that brings me to another question part of affording it what data do we have that shows us that class size needs to be addressed like how do we know because you mentioned that and i'm thinking fte now so and as a teacher it's nice to have smaller classrooms bigger classrooms are harder especially when you have to do differentiated instruction so there's got to be a sweet spot i agree that there's got to be a sweet spot but again fte

149so what what does that impact look like and then my last question is um uh i i think that's it i i can be done okay and i think one one quick one and you said y'all so quickly that maybe there's a chance you're from the south crucial information here so he's always good i'm a military brat i was born in tennessee and then ended up in indiana where my dad retired so i'm from indianapolis so it does my dad would say it's my tennessee roots but my parents are from wisconsin and i sometimes sound like i'm from wisconsin so i i i don't know what to tell you especially it was a conundrum for me i know right but i can also say y'all and it's like fine so you know that will allow

150it thank you and i think in terms of other questions that either you know v8 moment driving home or you think about them send them to me i sit on the c3 committee or any of the other commitments in terms of feedback that you'd like us to consider or questions that you want us to be prepared because again this is a committee conversation we will be bringing updated reports and potentially including some of the answers to these questions to the summary of this that we'll be delivering at the april board meeting i i have 10 to 20 questions right here that i could fire off just as part of like the you know turning the wheels a little bit if anyone wants to hear them um i'll just i can just start um teachers who

151have been in the game for a long time have seen this trend come and go several times why is it different this time i've seen it and i didn't teach as long as you guys have been teaching i've seen it come and go twice actually um what does the level of commitment with regard to professional development and investment from the district look like differentiation by one by one teacher in a classroom of 25 let's just say is a struggle how can the district support teachers i'm sorry so how can the district support teachers with that differentiation when it comes to class size um how much is this all going to cost in reality with regard to full-time positions which of our local peer districts are contemplating this model what is the success rate of this

152model and i know that's a very broad question because what are you know by what way are we measuring that success um what how does this affect teacher morale how does this affect teacher morale right now in a postcovid world in the inner city school model what were the tools for assessment to calculate success what were the long-term indicators of success did these same students go on to be successful at four-year universities did they earn degrees will these heterogeneous groupings be the norm for math and literacy classes only it sounds like no uh or for transition in college prep levels only again sounds like not necessarily um for other academic areas as well and basically my overarching question though was is there a way to do this incrementally um so those are just oh and

153one more significant question i think that really kind of addresses some of that teacher buy-in but um does it take away autonomy from our teachers or does it provide them with more that's really good questions my only questions were on metrics because it takes a certain number of metrics to go from point a to first point of change but then sustaining it is a potentially a different metric so what are those categories i'd be interested in seeing those i am all in for bringing for elevating for everybody i see this as a elevating for everybody and i'm all in for that uh i look forward to see how how we talk about it i i'm i'm over the being mystified about detracting i don't like the word i think yeah we need public relations yeah

154i think it needs a different terminology a rebrand yes i think that the community needs to hear something different than that but yeah i like expanded access i like that but if we're going to go down this road we need to start with the right verbiage so that we do get that community buying that you said was so important and we have to be very careful that uh our equity work never gets perceived as being subtractive because that is not what it is it's additive remember what we're doing is we're talking about all of our students reaching higher levels of achievement so this is not taking away from any population of students what this is about our work in any level of our system is about our all of our students being happier healthier and

155higher performing so this is an additive to our system it's an ultimate good we have a value we have a value of expanding access and getting all of our students to higher levels of success and one potential uh strategy for raising that may be some types of heterogeneous groupings right but we're really just at the front end of saying how could our actions align to our values and again challenge ourselves to not say it's got to be a technical solution that is very narrow in approach but rather a part of a larger cultural transformation of the way d128 schools are organized to support student learning and so that's you know very clear that you are challenging us to take and to be very thoughtful about the way we expand access the way we raise learning

156and achievement for all of our students and to do so in a way that is supported through the system both with budget with pd with uh teacher ability to operate in this new system so this is very helpful for us as we begin to continue to move this work forward and i'd just love to say as a teacher and as an equity coordinator i'm so grateful that we have a board of education who cares deeply about our students and our teachers and wants to make sure that all can be successful and you all brought up all the questions that we've been pondering and so i'm just i am so grateful for the questions that you've asked because it's going to push us to make sure that we're really doing this thoughtfully so that we can

157meet the needs of our teachers and our students oh why superintendent previous superintendent once told me talking about this very issue he wanted to raise the floor and remove the ceiling so that all students can reach their ultimate potential so i'll just leave it at that and again if you as dr herman was saying if you think of a question on the way home or something got her an email and we'll start gathering those and might not have the answers to all of them but they're good things to think about thank you for all the work thank you thank you okay um nothing more on that um next uh e-learning plan yes so um just to provide some context this is really a renewal it's a procedural step in our e-learning plan that according to

158illinois legislation allows us to use an e-learning day in lieu of five emergency days over the course of a calendar year so we don't have to extend our year with an emergency day when any emergency whether it is a snow day or some other emergency occurs and so we were one of the earliest districts to follow the new legislation and to get our plan in um in uh during the 20 1920 school year it the process for doing this is to write a plan that meets the criteria of the legislation to have you as a board approve it and to present it to our regional office of education for their endorsement of our plan and our their permission from the state as the state authority to allow us to use an e-learning day so our

159plan is expiring um this year and the new plan covers the next three year period it is organized by the legislation the headings are the things that we need to answer to in the legislation and provide information as to how we will address those um requirements in our plan um and so we the the e-learning plan um simply provides information about how we're going to pro take student attendance and provide access to all students we all of our students have chromebooks so we've addressed that we provide wi-fi to students who who can't access it and we have a plan that we've been using now quite well through covid in which teachers post their assignments in google classroom students are aware of where to look for their assignments in google classroom and they complete what is

160akin to a five-hour school day of work on an e-learning day we have added that since we've learned from our earlier plan that teachers can provide synchronous learning if they choose to that we've added that as an option on an e-learning day teachers may choose to during their class period offer synchronous learning it's not a requirement on the single emergency day because teachers may have similar excuse me similar emergencies that might prevent them from providing synchronous learning so this really does not change much what had been our standard plan it just describes how we will use those days uh should the need arise of course anyone have any yeah quick question and a comment actually a prestigious question it's who would have thought back in the fall of 1919 yes that we would be developing

161and we too were were one of those early adopters uh a plan that would become so even if it's not a fully fleshed out for an entire year of remote learning that it would have been uh so valuable to us at that point in time so that's i i don't need an answer to that but the the the question i have is is there any action that we will need to take this country we will need to formally uh the board will need to formally adopt this plan at the board meeting we have shared the information about the renewal of the plan with our union president after tonight's meeting if there are no changes i will also contact him to let him know that this is what we hope to adopt um [Music] and once

162you adapt then it's not in place until we send it to the roe and they formally approve it from the state do we need to add sorry do we need to add language if a teacher does choose to have a synchronous class that how that is how that information is disseminated to something easy yeah in the in the google classroom is how we've yeah i could i could i mean add another because it says previously that all the information will be shared through google classroom but i understand you're suggesting it should be more explicit there to say that if they choose to this meeting right it won't sign in during their time right and that's happened to several kids that they didn't know the teacher was they didn't read it well or something to affect

163the teacher there has to be something disseminated that synchronous learning is yeah it would happen yeah it would be it would be part of what they put in their google classroom for the expectations for that day but i can certainly add a line that makes that more explicit where it says that they the teachers may offer synchronous learning and will inform students through google classroom of that decision would that work it doesn't hurt to be redundant for sure i don't want to put it on the teachers more that students have to know that they have to look that's not my question you know i mean i i think i've just heard a couple that students didn't realize that teachers were doing it and i'm sure it's because they didn't look well right but they know

164that so students know they have to look for their assignment in google classroom so if teachers are including that offer of synchronous learning during the period it will show up in that google classroom where students are being instructed to look for that day's work so i think that will work and if it doesn't i'm sure right i i there's not an you know where i think it would become more complicated if there was another way for students to discover synchronous learning so it should be part of the seamless process of where they're looking to check for um that classes learning assignment for that day any other things that you might like um do you have the document in front of you under collective bargaining negotiations and notice dot dot highlighted um we um we're not

165sure that um you would suggest changes that might delay this for a bit longer so i'm assuming that we have the time now if we we remove this from today's committee meeting we could post a public hearing at the april meeting and have you adopted in april i wasn't sure if you might want us to do anything else where it might be delayed until the may meeting so that's why i didn't include a date in there but i will now update that one phrase and i will include the april uh board meeting date and we will get it on the board agenda for adoption yeah because this does require an adoption a public a public hearing prior to prior to that adoption at that meeting yes then i have one more question about the last

166sentence these communications will occur at least 30 days prior to utilizing an e-learning day how do we like what happens if we have to use an e-learning day five days into the school year um well once you adopt it we'll communicate these expectations with our teachers as a result of the adoption this has been shared the plan has been shared um and they understand that the protocols are existing protocols so we would you know once it's adopted i'll send a message to the staff that this is being adopted for the 22-23 school year that because we've been we've experienced and had professional learning on these protocols right that we will be able to use that this emergency day process um from day one of the 22-23 school year because their current one's still in the

167future yes yeah so this doesn't change any of the major protocols from our current plan okay so we'll just let them know we're going to keep it going and could use it starting day one i think that was probably wording that was more important and suggested by the the regional office on the first go around so that right people were well aware this e-learning plan that's new and different was was fully communicating and sometimes when you're asking you know someone to approve something it's it's easier to organize what you're submitting by the requirements that they're looking for so that's why i left all of those headings there in the same way so that they would see that we had met the requirements of the legislation make it easier for the approval to go quickly as

168it did the first time we submitted it okay thank you okay other questions comments all right let's move on a review of board policies might i suggest that we table this for sure just because of the we have plenty more things to do it's already it was 86 pages it was really long yeah though the one thing was there was a lot of updates that were done in february of 2022 so we have read through some of that um but i can definitely do that the next meeting and highlight some of the other ones yeah yeah can i ask a favor of that brian and i don't know if this is even possible but i while i was reading through them and uh kind of just trying to figure out what was old and what

169was new can you is there any way you can separate out the ones that were updated in february of 22 and just leave the ones that are in need of additional updating yeah i just scrolled through and i know i it's yeah so it's not that they're neat in need of additional updating they just haven't been uh so i could pull the ones out that are from older than february 2022 and then put that in the next packet do you mind i know that would make it really easy to review it thank you you can do that thanks yeah because it yeah like if we're looking through a bunch of policies and we just looked through this i kept saying to myself exactly this looks awfully familiar and then i of course do yeah there

170were a lot of updates in on the february 2022 from the legislation from last summer okay okay more to come on that next uh next month no problem good idea jim um personnel items we just have a list of uh folks here um any comments or questions on any of these are pretty typical we see a lot of certified rehires okay which we anticipated last month so um educational tours we got a couple um state competition i always like when those words are put in there go dance teams yeah any questions about either of those two not about those in particular but in general i just got to get to my notes real quick uh yeah it says the district is not the provider of the trip to the uda overnight camp experience at wheaton

171college occurring on or around june 7 through 10 undertaken by casey dugan who is it provided by so that's the statement that we have we have made that distinction in all of our ad tours especially since um covet and some of the concerns that emerged over who was responsible for any lost uh investment in trips and so we're distinguishing that we are approving um the opportunity for students to attend but it is the tour provider or the camp provider that is that the parents have a relationship with that tour provider or with the camp provider in in terms of the cost of the trip to students because we're actually transporting the students by bus to these places it's simply an alert um to further clarify that that financial obligation that parents are entering into with

172uh anyone that is providing the tour is a relationship between the the tour participants and that organization um there so there is some some mingling of responsibility in terms of transportation but that transportation we also provide on field trips that that that's not but that is not the cost of that experience to those students that transportation that we provide they wouldn't lose any investment in that transportation okay and just see i it just seems odd there like if we're sending a a group of students to compete someplace like then we're definitely providing that trip like because we're the if we send a football team downstate yeah this is not like this is more of um an organized competition by that uh junior this by that organization yeah by that organization so they're providing the experience

173we're just we're providing the transfer transportation and we're not charging the students for that so that doesn't occur across the board it only occurs for for things like this yes it would not you would not see that on a athletic competition athletic state competition that we're taking students to or right right or so the baseball team goes to spring break in phoenix yeah they do sign that right the baseball team goes to the state competition then they do not right thank you any other questions on those okay graduation ceremonies so um libertyville and vernon hills graduation ceremonies are coming up i know it's hard to believe already but uh they are thursday may 26th and so typically we split up our board members um to help hand out uh diplomas so three at um one

174and four at the other um and again libertyville high school will be at the sierra center in vernon hills um actually it's not the sierra center sorry um what is it did they rename it now the now center yeah and then vernon hills would be at the high school so we kind of needed to determine who is going where so that i can um submit that to our school so they know so program that's right this is the best role yeah this is board numbers to take it's so much it's it's fun if anyone had any thoughts on that or flip-flop potentially i know last year i attended along with sonal and lisa was there for vernon hills we were at vernon hills but i would love to see a libertyville graduation this year and

175if at all possible i'd also like to go because this is the last year that i have a friend who's got a kid that i could pass there diploma too i unfortunately won't be in town okay so no gems so we're gonna go three and three then minor detail and my daughter's getting married i guess i got my priorities during course that's what it is both at the same time too really so wait vernon hills they're both great casey any preference did you miss this part um no i know this part you know what i've done libertyville all since i've been on the board so i would like to do vernon hills this year lisa probably wants to be here yeah i have enlisted at vernon hills so i don't care well i think the

176idea of making sure when lisa's son graduates that she's there so she might want to do libertyville this year if we are going to try and flip-flop i don't think that's the case okay her son is not graduating this year no i that's why i was saying this year she might want to do liberty though next year so i will be here next right that's i guess i was just trying to make sure that that if we wanted to make sure parents have seniors yeah so now there you go all right [Music] lisa casey and cara at vernon hills right don cara and sanal at libertyville so i'll get the information to nora and to kelly the brewer and they'll probably send you information on everything thank you so the the only other question is

177who's going to accept the graduates and lisa you said lisa was going to be a converted house bernin hills who's going to do that yeah we can talk about that liberty bill yeah okay uh future agenda items sure mental agreement with vernon hills yeah so these are kind of tied in a little bit together um so i wanted to bring your attention that we're going to bring next uh month hopefully um so vernon hills uh park district is has expanded their swimming program um and has approached us um we have some intergovernmental agreements with vernon hills already for deer per deer path parks for use of tennis courts cross country we have an agreement with them for the use of our stadium at vernon hills um and so they approached us about oh we also

178used their sullivan center for some of our special olympics after school programs so they approached us about using the swimming pool which we are agreeable so we are working on that inter-government agreement with them so at the same time we had discussions with cats aquatics they have agreement with us to utilize both pools um and so they will primarily be using libertyville high school pool and vernon hills park district will be utilizing the vernon hills pool there's also a little bit of a name change with cats aquatics in that they formerly are becoming rise aquatics club and what that change is is that there is uh cats aquatics local libertyville practice here we'll do everything at libertyville high school but when they go to either state competitions or national competitions they are teaming up with

179the team down in willowbrook and that allows them to expand for relays and for other things so they formally their rise the kids from willowbrook will never come up and practice we'll never go down there and practice but their focus will be really on practicing here so i'm going to be working on updating all of our agreements with vernon hills park district working with our attorneys on how we want to structure all of that because there are a lot of different facilities types of facilities so um you know been working well with jeff over at vernon hills uh park district and so they've been a great team partner so that's kind of the quick update but i wanted to give you a heads up on a future agenda items so that you're prepared and again

180hoping to have that in the may but can i toss one more intergovernmental agreement concept and i've heard about this and i've been doing some reading about this i understand there's a new requirement for intergovernmental agreements between high school and center districts for data sharing that is in the works thank you for bringing that might be a future agenda item as well yeah yeah anything else any other okay uh let's call the uh programming personnel meeting adjourned second and then we'll come back for the facilities and finance thank you program and personnel committee meeting adjourned currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next

181currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next

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183currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next

184currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next currently on break facilities and finance committee meeting up next order the facilities and finance uh committee meeting uh we've already done the pledge of allegiance um public comment anyone present for public comment any comments okay all right review of march committee minutes anything you'll notice there are no minutes there but they will be we'll have to get those to you at a future times okay all righty

185uh capital projects update for the summer uh this one uh there really is no there really is no further update on this one okay uh upcoming bids and contracts the d128 transition pathways yeah so um now that we have the the lease in hand with the transition pathways program we have to build out the space and so they've been working for months on design putting that together we're going to need to pay for that project that project is not in my fiscal 22 budget um why i don't know we weren't totally sure if the timing would happen mostly over the summer but we really need to start construction on that this spring and so um you know we're still working on price it probably will be in the rain i would guess in the range

186of one and a half million ish to build out that space totally it's a pretty detailed gut and then putting everything else in place for that program for decades to come so in order to do that you know our legal authority to spend money is limited by our budget and so um as i've updated you past we've got some things that are trending exactly on budget a few things trending under budget so would we come under budget by enough to offset that cost maybe but it's not worth the risk for me and so at this point what i would recommend and i'll bring this back forward to you more into a future meeting is a budget amendment for our fiscal year 22 and all i'm saying is what we're just going to do is just

187add a little bit of money to the capital projects fund essentially transfer money from o m to capital projects um probably half to a million dollars just for what we would spend for this fiscal year which is done june 30th so there wouldn't be much there probably but we probably will have something there and i just want to make sure there's enough there to not cause us a problem that let's say everything did come in exactly at budget and we spent this then we would overspend our budget and that's that's not something that i'm really a lot that we're allowed to do you know what i mean um so that will be coming we i don't even have a uh really fleshed out like it'll it'll be similar to other projects like the field house

188and stuff where we've had it pretty fleshed out here's the trade costs here's the design cost here's the owner cost furniture equipment that kind of stuff we're still working on all that stuff but that will come shortly and we'll see that before we see the amendment for the budget uh you might see it at the same time i don't know because the amendment has to follow the same budget adoption as a normal budget so you have to it has to be the amount posted for 30 days you have to have a hearing you know do you have to go through the whole thing so we may have the final adoption of the budget amendment may not be till june but it just kind of wraps everything up for the fiscal year so so this isn't

189anything we'll be voting on at the regular board meeting not this one no any questions okay moving on to uh looks like we have some things to dispose of some obsolete equipment yep athletics is cleaning house so there's a some things of more than diminutive value and just the the volume of jerseys they the new jerseys and uniforms they're getting rid of we want to make sure you guys were aware of that so that that information is in there again the reason why we include this is our board policy says that if we dispose a personal property that is more than diminutive value you have to be you have to approve that okay so that and we use it for accounting purposes so we take it off the books even though i'm sure this stuff

190is fully depreciated but still it removes it from our capital asset listing wherever possible we do have a tradition of donating things when we can just for the public's knowledge all right and that will be voted on at the regular board meeting uh future agenda items yeah um there will be a lot of things on future agenda items there would have been a lot more tonight uh but circumstances prevented such tonight but we'll have a budget amendment that's what that's the budget amendment i mentioned only related to the transition program no other reason we're going to keep everything the same as it is another one is our tile contract we'll talk more about that but that is that constant frustration but that'll be at a future meeting especially those who've been around for a little

191while um it keeps coming up um there will be other ones and so just because of uh inability to get stuff for tonight we'll probably have more stuff for the actual april board meeting that are probably more discussion items than we i would normally want to have here but i couldn't get it for tonight so we'll probably have more discussion items for you at fnf um it may not be everything that i'm just about to list but it could be a number of these things we'll see how much we can get done one is the budget transfers that i mentioned in previous one we got to do those transfers to get everything lined up for the end of the fiscal year one of those will probably require a public hearing that we have to do

192by the end of the fiscal year so it's kind of like a fiscal year up cleanup related to that is sr3 grant so we're you know finalizing our sr3 written plan uh part of the filing for the grant to get that money about half a million dollars is um the board has to prove it as there has to be a public hearing for it so you'll see the plan at a future meeting and then we'll talk about scheduling a hearing for that probably at the may meeting something like that um and then we'll have to post that on our website and everything and get feedback from uh stakeholders um the conversation about fully deferring our taxes so that that will come at a future one uh similar with along the similar lines with that the

193fund balance policy that we've talked briefly about also that's still coming as the capital projects like the prioritization that kind of a process we're still fleshing that out and then finally at the next one i'd hope to give you a really good update on our food service i'd love to give an update doubt but it's not on our agenda and i want to be faithful to our public agenda um food service we went to rfp for that and we've had a tour so i want to kind of give give you all some information based on that because um we'll be ready uh we might be ready to make a decision on that pretty quickly for next year so one question on the esser grant what's the kind of filing date by which we have to

194submit the paperwork i don't know that there is one but those who have not done it yet everyone's just kind of trying to get it done by the end of this school year so i will check to see if there is one but um really you can you it dates back to the beginning of the pandemic you can use this money for any expenditures you've incurred since the beginning of the pandemic and then you have another two years beyond whenever you file for it to actually use the money so it's a multi-year grant that you can utilize but we're firmly within the timeline it's not like we're going to run out of time between now and the end of the fiscal year on anything like that just to pencil that in and that that plan

195that they have some restricting that restriction some requirements on using some of that money for learning loss recovery we'll have all that information in the plan for you okay well that's a lot of stuff for future agenda sounds exciting anyone else anything all right this might be a record but we're adjourning facilities and finance committee feeding 8 20.